Pixar-style lamp project is a huge animatronics win

Even with the added hardware that lamp still looks relatively normal. But its behavior is more than remarkable. The lamp interacts with people in an incredibly lifelike way. This is of course inspired by the lamp from Pixar’s Luxo Jr. short film. But there’s a little bit of most useless machine added just for fun. If you try to shut it off the lamp shade is used to flip that switch on the base back on.

[Shanshan Zhou], [Adam Ben-Dror], and [Joss Doggett] developed the little robot as a class project at the Victoria University of Wellington. It uses six servo motors driven by an Arduino to give the inanimate object the ability to move as if it’s alive. There is no light in the lamp as the bulb has been replaced by a webcam. The image is monitored using OpenCV to include face tracking as one of the behaviors. All of the animations are procedural, making use of Processing to convey movement instructions to the Arduino board.

The download link finally worked without crashing Firefox. That project is awesome. It would be cool as others have said to put lights in the ‘head’, and maybe to run the cables through the hollow leg tubing if it’s that standard accordion light tubing.

Firefox + Linux? If so, same here. If you click on the vimeo logo of the embedded not-working player you’re redirected to the Vimeo site. If I click on the video on the Vimeo site it *does* play correctly in Firefox on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04).

i’d have put a light,
just so it could turn itself OFF as soon as you turn it on.
three times and it starts jumping around and hits you!

knock it out before it has a chance to turn itself off (hit it in the piezo sensor),
and it stays on until it wakes up and then turns itself off again.
so it forms a five minute timer, but only for those willing to hit it (fight back).